Jan. 20th, 2016

Jan. 20th, 2016

Hah, if I had the money, I’d be gone for so long it’d be better to just sell my house. Part of my thing with travel is that I can’t possibly know and understand a place if I just go there for a week. I want to stay and have it become part of me. I have a friend who travels a lot, and he keeps telling me that he always is looking for the next new place, and I do get that, but I keep thinking about all the stuff I still learn and find when I go back to places I’ve loved. So, if I traveled, I’d want to spend a while at each place, to the point that I might as just not worry about coming home. (Sadly, every time I investigate regular (ie, non-independently wealthy) people who travel for an extended period of time, I always stumble on the funding issue—selling my house/liquidating my retirement accounts to fund a year or two of life on the road does not seem to be a good trade, so I am still here in my normal life.)

And then I’d go back to Hawaii for the winter, basing the visit up in the hills overlooking Honolulu and bouncing around to the other islands, especially the volcanoes on the Big Island, but making sure I was around for the Triple Crown (surfing) on the North Shore. Then we could hopscotch across the South Pacific and end up in Tokyo in the spring. Possibly the summer, too, b/c the humidity in Singapore, etc, would probably knock me flat. But at some point, I’d need to see Hong Kong (staying on the Kowloon side so I could have those incredible views) and Shanghai (the girl who sits next to me at the new office has already offered her family’s home as a place to stay, but I have no idea where that might be.) I have worked with too many people from India to be in their hemisphere and not stop to visit, so Pune to begin with and then wherever they tell me to go.

I have no idea how one might go about tracing the Silk Road, but I’m sure somebody must offer a guided trip, which would put me back in Eastern Europe, so a stop in southeastern Poland to see if there’s anyone left of my father’s family would be good. We could knock around Prague and Budapest for a while, and maybe Turkey, as one of my bridesmaids has family there. Italy is always on the list, as is Switzerland. I could live in London and wander around the UK for forever. Norway would also be on the list for the Northern Lights and then it would be good to go south to Africa for the rest of the winter.